Leo Panitch

Leo Panitch is Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy and Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at York University. Editor of The Socialist Register for 25 years, his many books include Working Class Politics in Crisis, A Different Kind of State, The End of Parliamentary Socialism, and American Empire and The Political Economy of Global Finance.

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Leo Panitch, professor of Political Science at York University, and co-author of The Making of Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire, recently spoke to New Books Network about his work in an in-depth interview.

In The Making of Capitalism, Panitch and co-author Sam Gindin argue that the American state has been central to the creation and maintenance of a global capitalist economy, and that the internalization of American capital in sovereign states across the globe has placed the US at the helm of an informal empire. The book won the 2013 Deutscher Prize for the most innovative writing in or about the Marxist tradition.

Neoliberal economics isn't working and students are demanding more from their course reading than the 8th edition of Macroeconomics can provide. Following the news that Economics students in Manchester have formed the Post-Crash Economics Society and Aditya Chakrabortty's excoriating and controversial commentary on the state of contemporary economics, published in the Guardian, Verso presents a reading list of economics titles which challenge the mainstream neoliberal consensus and offer powerful alternative models in contemporary economics.

First up, Wolfgang Streeck's analysis of the 2008 financial crisis, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. Placing the crisis in the context of the neoliberal transformation of society that began in the 1970s, Streeck's focus is on the tensions that this has produced between states, voters and capitalist enterprises. Buying Time asks fundamental questions about the compatibility between democracy and contemporary forms of capitalism. Read Streeck's excellent article on the end of capitalism at the New Left Review website.